Days of Futures Parsed
Trying to stay firmly on Nantucket and that particular Saturday in 1960, I get lost in my head one more time. This will be the last episode of this psychosis, I do hope — for your sake more than mine.
I finished that last Post with the four of us Sullivans still on Nantucket 64 years ago: the of Dad’s family adventure. There’s little of that hardly action-packed episode left, and I do hope to conclude it here.
Then Luci, I and our daughters are going to take a week’s vacation in South Carolina and I’m unsure whether to bring my laptop or not. You may or may not be hearing from me for a few days in the week ahead. I cannot do these Posts/essays/stories/whatever-they-are on a phone or on my wife’s iPad; I don’t have that dexterity or rhythm to synch those machines to my brain and fingers, having never practiced on them. There may be a further Post next week if I pack the MacBook, or I may just pile up ideas and make notes.
There will be a continuation of the Massachusetts islands thing in Posts ahead, with stories of more recent vintage. Of that much, I am sure. I know I want to tell you about Vito, at least, and a few other things I’ve remembered about Nantucket and also Martha’s Vineyard. I’ll tell you about a visit with Nat Philbrick. I may cook up an appreciation of the outdoors writer Nelson Bryant. I was in touch with Mr. Bryant at the home on the Vineyard years ago.
I realize I’m just talking out loud here, formulating an outline of activity rather than easing back onto Nantucket, into that day on Nantucket. I’m going to blame the state we’re in. I fear the aftermath of that wacky debate last night has left me in an existential, philosophical mood — killing any early-summer-school’s-out-sun’s-out mood. The dust of that debate is even influencing, just now, my re-read of my last Post as I begin this one. All of that Then and Now stuff . . . Have we ever had a now like Now?
I was going to move our family quickly from the hilltop windmill to a nearby Nantucket graveyard we found, then wrap up “Dad’s Nantucket Story.” But instead I’m contemplating that angel-dusted hunk of rock known as “Nantucket” — the Nantucket of six decades past when we first ventured there, the Nantucket of six decades fast forward, as I wondered on it at the end of the last post. I’m thinking about the future now in a “Deeeep” way, a way that’s way deeper (which is to say, far more turgid) than even the bottom I’d reached at the bottom of that Post.
Ahh, yes, 60 years on . . . The Future.
The rock will still be known as “Nantucket,” whether it’s above or below sea level, whether it’s a setting for, or a memory of, East Egg-esque cocktail parties. It’s not just Woods Hole oceanographers and ‘Sconset homeowners who know, today, that ACK may well be underwater one day. All of us know that. Should the rising tides of a warmer Atlantic have prevailed by six decades hence, Nantucket still will be being visited, but by tomorrow’s Jacques Cousteaus and James Camerons in their submersibles, who will be making docs about the bygone famous cataclysm that claimed Nantucket, Kiawah, Miami and so much else.
Then again, Nantucket may be fine and buttressed, owned wholly by Bill and Melinda’s or Eric Schmidt’s descendants, young ’uns who finally decided one fine spring morning, when looking out at the lighthouse or up at the windmill, that they needed a little more room, a bit more privacy. Perhaps Elon will develop a taste for Nantucket Bay scallops along his spacey way and eat the island whole, like the whale with his Jonah, and Elon’s heirs via his dozen kids with several women, whose fleet is docked in the Bay of Tesla™, will have built their wall.
Or . . .
Nantucket may be weirdly and newly iterated, standing upon pontoons. It may be sitting upon floating pods.
I joked in the last Post about being 134 years of age in six more decades, but let’s be honest, I may not make it. If I do not, my Mom and Dad, my wife and I will be where we once were before we were here on Earth with you, and it will be my and Luci’s kids having their hips replaced. Our descendants will be doing their human thing, and Nantucket will be doing its rock thing, stoic in the face of what “the humans” have in store for it next.
It’s all a rock can do, after all. Left behind as a formation of some volcano or as the trash of a glacial migration, it then just sits and erodes, between times used and sometimes subjugated by humans, or blasted away by them as they seek more valuable rocks hidden behind or below. If a rock is really lucky, it is flat, smooth and small, and it can be skipped — one merry hop, two, three! — across the surface of a placid pond, then allow to sink slowly to the bottom, where it rests forevermore.
What interests me when I think of this is: Nantucket’s evolution up there in Massachusetts. It seems like an avant garde variation on that theme of my own families’ progress. (This tangent’s odd for even me. It is fanciful, I well realize. It is even silly. But it amuses me, and so . . . )
Our Chelmsford family was pretty modest and unassuming — perfectly fine, not down-at-heel but certainly paycheck-to-paycheck — in 1960, not unlike Nantucket in its Wampanoag days before Bartholomew Gosnold, of all largely forgotten English barrister/explorer/privateers, first sighted it in 1602. Our family, native of Massachusetts Commonwealth just as Nantucket is native of what would become the Commonwealth, has been met by what is called largely good health and good fortune. We certainly feel fortunate, and I know Mom and Dad always felt fortunate during their adulthood. Just the fact of Dad returning from the war intact and therefore able to marry Mom in Lowell and start a family in Chelmsford encouraged feelings of good fortunate. Whatever came their way thereafter seemed gravy.
Happiness kept coming in the 1970s, ’80s and onward — to us and to Nantucket. Are Luci and I happier now than we were in 1960, when I was going on seven and she was so very much younger, as she would eternally remain? Well, sure, in a way we’re happier because we found one another in the earliest ’80s at a party in Lexington. We’re happy some folks we both knew threw that party. We’re super happy we have our kids. We’re a little wacked out by that debate last night, but . . .
I think we were perfectly happy in 1960 and are perfectly happy now. We’ve sort of been a human Nantucket, sitting there, seeing what life brings next, selfishly basking in the happiness of the moment.
I guess if you grew up in postwar America as part of the Baby Boom, you — at least, we — were preconditioned or taught, in some elementary and entirely incorrect way, to think that life would always or at least usually go well, and that all post-neanderthal people, all post-Washington and Lincoln Americans certainly, would be well and act well. We weren’t to be worried about the many human-made wars inevitably to come, the floods and famines — and we would thank our gods, if we believed in gods. It seemed to us kids that it would be pure bad luck that would cause one to not be happy in America.
There are two modern things that got me wondering about all of our early life lessons about the future that we were taught in Chelmsford in 1960: not so much the incidental debates last night, but two enduring, quatifiable scientific fissures: the creep of Climate Change, certainly, and then that sudden and surprising onslaught of Covid-19.
Okay, at some point Covid-19 will take its assigned place in the Historical Roster of Plagues, and may, in that finalized tally, be well down the list when death toll in terms of total global populations are factored. I don’t know where the horror-shows of the Bubonic Plague or “Spanish” Flu or Polio will sit. What I do worry about is: Covid-19 was named because it emerged in 2019. Twenty-nineteen.I don’t care whether it escaped from a Chinese lab, was passed by a cow or transmitted in a wet market. Our future world will continue to have labs, cows and wet-markets, and something will probably develop in each of them in centuries to come. What chills me is: We’re deminbstrably not ready for whatever it is or however much worse than Covid-19 it might be. More than three a-half million people have died in less than half a decade in the modern-science 21st century due to Covid-19. How does that even happen? Aren’t we supposed to be ready for anything? What worse might still happen, out there?
I didn’t used to believe the sci-fi movies. I didn’t believe things like Covid-19 were possible.
Now, I believe something may be lurking that’ll surprise us just as readily and make Covid-19 look like a summer cold. Might it wipe us out? I’ll bet DraftKings has a line on that.
I believe all sorts of things now that I thought only Ray Bradbury believed when I discovered The Martian Chronicles in the wire rack at Page’s Drugstore in Lowell in, oh, maybe 1965. I believe that in 60 years weather patterns will be nothing we recognize today, and Canada’s ski industry will be booming. Moscow will represent an altered kind of autocracy and Washington will represent some evolved or devolved version of democracy, last night’s debate a footnote to its progress or retrogression. Visitors from the Kepler exoplanets will have arrived or not; they’ll be chummy or not; they’ll be hanging with Elon’s great-grandkids on Nantucket, or not. I believe any of that might come to pass.
Us and Nantucket, Then and Now, Ever Thus, Always the Way, Dust to Dust, Tried and True, Nothing New Under the Sun, The Way of All Flesh, The Progress of Man, Human Nature, Mother Nature — all the same theme, I guess, at The End of the Day.
Which brings me back along the curvy path to the Nantucket cemeteries.
After Mom, Dad, Kevin and I were done with the windmill we found a few graveyards, and I thought these were cool in the extreme. Mama and Margot were still alive in Lowell, and since Kevin and I had been deemed too young for Papa’s funeral, I had never yet been to a burial ground. This was so cool.
Nantucket was clearly a place that properly honored its dead, of which there were, quite obviously and surprisingly for such a small place, reasonable multitudes. In 1960, it seemed the island had deeded nearly as much of its acreage to the dearly beloved as to those still standing and building small cottages.
I have no idea which graveyard we started with but can logically assume it might have been New North, which really wasn’t so very new since it had started accepting overflow candidates from Old North in 1820. I cannot forgo or longer forestall the lame joke, so will deliver it now, as much to get it out of my system as anything: New North, like a couple of other cemeteries we chanced upon in the next hour or so, had not only lots of coffins but lots of Coffins. Coffins were clearly preeminent in the first Caucasian generations to settle upon the rock. Also found were an over-abundance of Folgers, Gardners, Husseys, Swains — Nantucket’s old guard, its “founding fathers” as judged by White-Euro lights (with the Wampanoags issuing a dissent). Those Olde Anglo names were absent in the so-called Indian and Colored cemeteries, but they were again dominant in the small but well-kept Quaker Burial Ground.
I think Dad’s family trip to Nantucket engendered in Kevin and me an affinity for graveyards and ghost stories. When Mom and Dad guided us on the Freedom Trail in Boston in later (but not much later) years, I was more taken with Mother Goose’s grave than with Old North Church, and in Concord I thought the modesty of Thoreau’s and Emerson’s plots on Authors’ Ridge was fitting and, in their simplicities, moving and inspirational. I haven’t been an obsessive about this throughout my life. I didn’t make a pilgrimage for Jim Morrison when in Paris, or Karl Marx when stationed in London. But at some point, I took to reading the fiction of M.R. James every Hallowe’en season, and my favorite Henry James is probably The Turn of the Screw (which is also, praise the God of Literatoor, a whole lot shorter than The Golden Bowl). I remember enjoying the graveyard scenes in Tom Sawyer, Frankenstein, Great Expectations, Hamlet, The Nightmare Before Christmas and, with our kids when they were growing up, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
The Sullivans of ’60 finished with our Nantucket graveyards tour and looked around. We could just about see the ocean from up there, just above the hillsides. It looked nice and still, as if having been painted into stillness. The vista was odd and seemingly endless, a slate-black/blue fading to grey mainland meeting up with a slate-grey sky on a horizon heading off towards what Dad might have mentioned, as if it were some beloved auld sod of his, Ireland — that-a-way. The breeze up here was strong. Wind turbines were in Tomorrowland’s picture, not this one. It was a regal Turner sky melting into Homer’s ocean swells.
We weren’t going sailing or swimming this day and tried to figure what to do next. We decided on lunch. So, we headed back down the hill. Near the marina, we found a shack for chowder. The soup was very thick and therefore good to a chubby six-year-old with a whiffle haircut and a new adventure now in his pocket. Then it was time to re-board the three o’clock ferry since, for Dad and Mom, and particularly now with infant Gail back home with Mama as a factor, everything had to be a day trip.
Kevin and I slept on the couch of the Olds as it climbed up and over the Bourne Bridge, all cars moving.
Thus ends Dad’s Nantucket Story. If you stuck with me through this wayward, storm-tossed voyage, I can promise you smoother sailing ahead. See you after vacation, maybe sooner if I pack the laptop.
I vote for a Nelson Bryant piece. Nice guy.